Obama Is Letting Turkey Target The U.S.’s Best Bet Against ISIS

Attacked by their government for months, Kurds in Turkey are desperate for U.S. support.

Turkey’s brutal treatment of its Kurdish population could plunge the country into a full-on civil war and make the Middle East even more chaotic, a Turkish parliamentarian warned Wednesday during a visit to Washington to plead for more American attention to the problem.

Osman Baydemir, a Kurdish member of Turkey’s leftist, pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic party, or HDP, said he is part of an HDP delegation speaking with officials at the State Department, staffers in Congress and civil society activists to ask for more American pressure on the Turkish government to end the violence.

“It’s the worst situation I’ve ever seen,” the 45-year-old politician said through a translator at a press event at the Washington Kurdish Institute. “Turkey is becoming a version of Syria.”